W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 5-2011 Archaeologists as Authors and the Stories of Sites: A Defense of Fiction in Archaeological Site Reporting Allison Jane Mickel College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Part of the Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Mickel, Allison Jane, "Archaeologists as Authors and the Stories of Sites: A Defense of Fiction in Archaeological Site Reporting" (2011). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 409. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/409 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Acknowledgements It is an unusual position for an author to find herself in where she feels indebted to the characters she has written. It is, however, uniquely wonderful to be able to express gratitude to the human counterparts of those characters, as I am able to do here. I’ll never be able to sufficiently thank the Bir Madhkur team members, residents of Bir Madhkur, and Dr. Andrew M. Smith II of The George Washington University for their permission to let me creatively interpret their words, actions, and experiences during the summer field season of 2010. Without all of your input and contributions, I would have hab no hands, instead relying on some hegemonic determiner of authority to avoid being an LBOTS. I must also express my appreciation to those people and organizations whose generosity made it possible for me to conduct my fieldwork. I hope that Mr. Nicholas Mele, Dr. Heather French, Dr. Nathan Altshuler, and the committee for the James H. Critchfield Memorial Endowment feel, in seeing this final product, that their confidence and support was well-placed. I hope that Dr. Richard Lowry, Dr. Neil Norman, and Dr. Marley Brown III, my committee members, feel the same way, and that they are able to see how their critiques and suggestions directly enabled the success of this project, and shaped the scholar that I am and hope to become. I need to voice my particular gratitude to Dr. Norman for having been such an incredible mentor through my undergraduate career, and to Dr. Brown, who has advised me in the classroom, on research, and beyond, from my first archaeology class to my last. Finally, I’d like to thank my friends and family members whose diverse ways of encouraging me and helping me made the thesis-writing process bearable, even enjoyable. Late-night rallying conversations about archaeological theory and editing presentations on sunlit benches with Jon Irons; writing through so many winter days in an office on Laurel Avenue with my mother Elaine Mickel; my father Stephen Mickel asking to come to Virginia and cheer me on for my thesis defense. Any expression of thanks, however infinite and sincere, would be inadequate in light of the depth and breadth of all of your neverending support. Simply, then, I love you too. Table of Contents I. Introduction IA. Purpose of Paper 1 IB. A Brief History of Relevant Themes in Archaeology 2 IC. Problems with Positivism 5 ID. Important Definitions 12 II. Literature Review IIA. Popular Fiction 17 IIB. Fictive Dialogues 22 IIC. Imagined Pasts 29 IID. Archaeologists as Characters 35 IIE. Summary and Discussion 44 III. Defending Fiction IIIA. The Necessity for Creative Thought 48 IIIAi. Multiscalar Analysis 51 IIIAii. Shifting Perspectives and Creating Worlds 54 IIIB. Paralleling Archaeological Epistemology 57 IIIC. Addressing Imperfections and Interactions 63 IIID. Positionality 68 IIIE. Multivocality 76 IIIF. Accessibility to Public 81 IV. Conclusion 86 V. Transformations at a Roman Bathhouse 92 IA. Purpose of Paper. My reasons for this thesis are many and layered. On a pragmatic level, it is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts at the College of William and Mary. It serves as the capstone component of completing a major in anthropology. This paper is also meant to contribute to contemporary archaeological dialogue which reflects upon the products of archaeological knowledge. It offers a suggestion to archaeologists, that making use of the writing techniques involved in fictional narrative writing could contribute in an important way specifically to site reporting and, more generally, archaeological discourse. After an introductory section in which I make clear the theoretical framework from which I structure my argument, I review the existing archaeological literature that has forayed into experimentation with the fictional narrative form. I then proceed through a discussion of a series of benefits intrinsic to writing fictional narrative which are relevant to current concerns in archaeology and moreover, which are vital to responsible archaeological practice. I have also applied my abstract defense of fiction by creating a site report focusing on the 2010 summer field season at Bir Madhkur, a Roman-period site in the Wadi Araba of Jordan. Without including this case study, I fear that my argument will remain in the realm of highbrow but inaccessible philosophizing; instead, I hope to concretize the theoretical benefits of fictional writing for archaeologists in this tangible form. I intend, with this paper, to participate in a wider movement in archaeology calling for critical self-examination with regard to the processes underlying the way archaeologists construct and disseminate archaeological knowledge. Fictional narrative represents a mode of representation that is more relevant, transparent, and responsible in 1 light of contemporary epistemological understandings about archaeology as a discipline. The chapters that follow detail why. IB. A Brief History of Relevant Themes in Archaeology. Dissatisfaction with the established forms of archaeological writing has a history rooted in the theoretical movements in archaeology of the past half-century especially. The greatest degree of experimentation in academic archaeological literature can perhaps be seen in publications from the late 1980‟s and 1990‟s, during which time postmodernism had a dramatic impact on anthropology. This is especially true in North America, where archaeology is generally conceived of as a subdiscipline of anthropology, although archaeologists with training outside of the United States (most notably Ian Hodder, along with Barbara Bender and Mark Edmonds, among others) have also examined problems with traditional archaeological writing. For all archaeologists, the commentary on and styles of archaeological writing that proliferate reflect larger theoretical discussions going on in their academic and regional communities (Joyce 2006, 48; Robertshaw 2004). Therefore, it is crucial to contextualize the ongoing academic discourse surrounding early forays into narrative by archaeological writers. During the mid-20th century, many scholars of the humanities began to express doubt about the possibility of representing objective truth in writing— and, moreover, about the existence of objective truth at all. Perhaps the most recognizable and widely influential of these scholars include Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Their questioning of established sources of authority, and of some of the most essential categories in Western thinking, gathered traction with humanists in a multitude of disciplines, coalescing in a general movement of 2 scholars whose diverse approaches share a common strain of critical thought broadly termed as postmodern. Postmodernism‟s impact on anthropology can be seen to become most forceful beginning in the 1980‟s. James Clifford and George Marcus‟s Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, published in 1986, features essays by many cultural anthropologists struggling with the implications of reconceiving „truthful‟ representation as a myth. Ethnographies published in the 1990‟s often feature experimentation with language and normative prose, responding both to a newfound freedom from the strict rules of scientific discourse—and, moreover, the implied responsibility to challenge these rules and their undeserved authority. The influence of postmodernism on the subfield of archaeology is perhaps less immediately conspicuous when reviewing archaeological writing. Contemporaneously with the advancement of postmodern thought, many archaeologists began to identify themselves as „postprocessual‟ archaeologists. Postprocessualism is predicated on many of the same tenets as postmodernism; key among these are the discrediting of neutrality in hermeneutics and an attack on essentialism, as well as a discomfort with established, confining disciplinary boundaries (Johnson 2010; Mithen 2001). Tangibly, the postprocessual school of thought encouraged eliciting and actively collaborating with historically marginalized viewpoints, as well as critical inquiry into archaeological perspectives on concepts like gender, race, and individual experience. Postprocessualism encourages a proliferation of archaeologies, rather than hailing a singular approach as epistemologically hegemonic. It values Socratic self-questioning, and is more inclined to trust analysis presented by archaeologists who engage in reflecting upon their own 3 perspectives and methodology. Within this framework, an exploration of the potential of fictional narrative